


Breathless

by ElDiablito_SF



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
Genre: Angst, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Greek melodrama, M/M, Sexual Content, woe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-01
Updated: 2012-12-01
Packaged: 2017-11-19 23:54:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/579016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/pseuds/ElDiablito_SF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Separated from Patroclus after death, thanks to Neoptolemus and his bratty tantrums, Achilles is left alone in Hades, waiting to be reunited with his beloved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breathless

**Author's Note:**

  * For [roslindi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roslindi/gifts).



  
_By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—_  
_Some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—_  
_than rule down here over all the breathless dead._  
\-       Achilles in Homer’s _The Odyssey_

 

**BREATHLESS**

 

It is dark.  The darkness drips like liquid drops around me, sometimes I feel it slimy and slippery, sliding between my fingers.  I grasp the empty air and call out your name – _Patroclus!_ – and only the darkness laughs back at me.  
  
Where are you, my love, my better self?  Your beloved shade should have preempted me here into this darkness, and made it all shine brighter than Phoebus himself.  Yet, I do not find you.  My voice echoes in these empty halls of Hades, and even Echo will not keep me company, fleeing from my misery.  
  
Time waits.  Time has no meaning here, and yet it waits, and seeks your form among the scattering shades, as I do, spitting my sorrows into the Styx.  
  
One moment is enough to transport me back and forth again, I fly between what was and what I wish would be, this soul beating like a caged bird within these empty corridors.  
  
Help me, Persephone – you, who know what it means to long for the ones you’ve lost, trapped beneath the earth with me, tell me – where is my beloved?  
  
I feel her presence, as ever before, the familiar coldness, distinct even within this realm.  The touch of her hand upon my shoulder does not soothe me, and yet, she is here out of love.  
  
“Mother.”  
  
“My son,” her gravely voice, so harsh even at the gates of Tartarus, sounds next to me.  
  
“Mother, why have you come again?”  My mother.  My poor ravaged Mother.  I have wept for you, as I have known myself to be already the fruit of your rape, and wept again knowing that I must leave you.  
  
“To beg you to reconsider.  Come, Achilles.  The fields of Elysium await.  Do not stay here, in this antechamber of Hades, where your glorious shade has no place.”  
  
She begs again.  Her whole life made of pleading.  Poor Thetis.  So beautiful, so formed to be adored, and yet abhorred, betrayed by the very Gods who should be her brethren.  I have counted your tears and mingled my own with them.  But what you ask of me, again, I must deny you.  
  
“Not without him,” I say.  Not without him.  Never, never without him.  
  
She leaves, and takes with her my memories in which I follow her.  
  
***  
  
There she was, majestic on the shores of Troy, the sea – an emerald wall forming a fortress behind her long, black locks of hair.  I always came when she called me, even though I knew the things she had to say to me.  
  
“Leave him.”  
  
“Mother, no.”  
  
“You are my son, the son of a Goddess – why do you share your life and your bed with that mortal, who is insignificant even among mortals?”  
  
It is the same story, every time.  A well-rehearsed drama, which we must play out, time and time again.  We are the actors, Thetis and I, and we have learned our lines well.  The waves of the sea crashing behind her formed a counterpoint chorus to her lamentations.  
  
“Abandon him.  Come away with me.  You could rule beneath the sea as well as you could rule among men.  Do not remain to die here, Achilles.”  
  
“I will not go where he cannot follow me.”  
  
“Forget the son of Menoetius!  He can only hold you back, my son.”  
  
“I am a better man for having loved him,” I responded, and she had glared back at me, that same, bright onyx stare, before she dove back into the waves.  
  
This memory does not make me happy, yet I return here, again and again, as if some clue to my troubles is hidden, washed up upon these shores.  The burning sands of Troy:  the last place Patroclus and I might have been truly happy.  Our love - our oasis in the eye of the Trojan storm.  
  
***  
  
Chiron’s cave.  I cannot help but turn my thoughts there, even now.  That perfect dawning of discovery.  My hands upon his face, his breath upon my neck, and the feeling that I was him and he was me.  
  
The night held no mysteries to us, for we were lords of the Universe there.  I can still feel the joy springing up in my chest, as I see his eyes beckoning, a permission granted unasked, a prayer answered, his lips brushing softly against my earlobe.  He liked to tease me because he knew how sensitive my flesh was there.  His hands were stronger in those moments than I had ever seen them in any other apprenticed form.  I felt that he was Atlas, and I was the world, and he could hold me for all eternity.  
  
And what did Chiron know?  Could he have seen the future when he began to teach Patroclus medicine?  Did he, perhaps, love and admire those hands as much as I did? All the glory come to me – the glory of a Death-bringer, when he, my beautiful beloved, he had the power to give life with his hands.  And no one could breathe life into me the way that Patroclus did with our first kiss.  
  
***  
  
Charon, ferryman of the dead, you who have played final captain to all of us who travel here – where is my beloved?  How long must these Stygian shores bear witness to my laments?  
  
You do not speak, and yet I read you plainly.  You have not brought him here, but why?  What could be the reason for this absence?  
  
Alone.  Alone, like me.  And likely just as miserable.  
  
“Achilles.”  
  
“Yes, Mother.”  
  
“You must away.  You have wasted your life on this mortal, why must you also insist on wasting your afterlife, when all of Elysium spreads its delights before you?  There the flowers never wilt, and the fruits never ripen past their prime.  Come, taste the ambrosia.  Come, sing and dance among the Gods and Heroes.”  
  
“Oh, Mother, this is low even for you.  You, who hate the Gods only a little less than you have ever hated mortals.  Leave me be; your pleas are useless.”  
  
“But, at last, how long will you wait?”  
  
“I feel the earth drunken on the blood and tears of Trojans.  I hear the shaking caused by horses’ hooves.  I see them come here, one by one, as Charon brings them forth.  Yet, none of them can tell me where Patroclus is.”  
  
“Achilles, this is madness.”  
  
“I prefer this madness to the sanity of betrayal.”  
  
She’s gone.  Whereas her tears burned me before, they do not touch me now.  I am but emptiness in this great hall.  A haphazard visitor, who shies away from their garish ball.  Let them dance in Elysium, I would rather weep in this darkness, than to join them without my beloved.  
  
Did you not mingle our ashes?  And did you not bury us together, as I asked?  Why do I not find him here?  
  
***  
  
Hold me, my love, hold me as you did on our last night together.  When I looked into your beautiful eyes, dark as the night was dark, and I did not see the shadows of Death hidden in their corners.  
  
My thoughts fly to you again, to our shared tent outside the impregnable walls of Troy.  You hush me, but I do not care if all the Myrmidons can hear us.  
  
How happy I was then, trailing kisses from the underside of your knees all the way up your thighs, and how foolish.  How blinded by hubris to have sacrificed you to nothing but my own pride.  Oh, forgive me, my love.  Take away the memory of what happened next, so that I can live only in this moment of our last night together.  
  
Your fingers raking through my hair, as I sucked and bit at the sinews of your exposed neck, and licked the drops of sweat pooling in the small groove where your chest rose up so broadly underneath me.  You called out my name, and I swallowed your ecstatic cries with my own lips, and you laughed because now I was the one hushing you.  Your body was buttressing my own, your thighs wrapped around my torso, clinging with the strength that I have never known with another before, nor ever would again.  At last, you lay spent underneath me, and all I could think about was how many minutes I shall grant you before I switch places with you and pull your body on top of mine.  Because it isn’t enough, it never was, and after all the years that we have been together, I still treasure your taste upon my lips, and the smell of your skin, and the way your hands grasp the back of my neck as you pull us impossibly closer together.  
  
O, stay!  Stay, beautiful vision.  I wilt in the darkness, like a flower, without your light.  
  
Mingle my ashes with his, for he is my one beloved.  
  
***  
  
I am back in the sepulchral gloom and all is as it ever was.  Devoid of hope, I sink beneath the weight of my own memories.  Time waits, and so I wait, my tears mingling with the waters of the Styx.  
  
The placid waters do not stir and I have stopped asking out loud, my constant question.  
  
A ripple.  A wave.  
  
Who goes there?  
  
A boat.  It’s Charon, ferrying across his latest fare.  
  
“Achilles.”  
  
His voice.  By the Gods… his voice… his face.  
  
“Patroclus?”  I can barely speak, the sounds leaving my throat more akin to an animal’s wail than a man’s speech.   I am a voice without a breath; I have been a shade without a shadow.  “My love, is that you?”  
  
His lips, his arms.  At last.  I crumble into his embrace.  
  
“Patroclus!”  
  
He is silent, but in his eyes there is the light of a thousand Elysian Fields.  
  
  
FIN

**Author's Note:**

> I was quite intrigued and touched by Madeline Miller's portrayal of Thetis and the passages describing Patroclus being stranded after death above ground. These aspects of the novel clearly influenced this piece. I hope you find it to your satisfaction, even though it probably channels Sophocles more than Miller herself, with Extreme Demigod Melodrama.  
> On that note, please check out this hilarious link which surfaced just as I was working on this: <http://cheezburger.com/6818227968>
> 
> Happy Yule!


End file.
